The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, composed of parents, advocates and educators throughout the nation, and whose members led the fight against inBloom, are relieved that the SAFE KIDS Act, co-sponsored by Senators Daine and Blumenthal, scheduled to be marked up in the Commerce Committee today was pulled at the last minute.

Rachael Stickland, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy said, “While we appreciate the sincere motivation of these Senators to put controls on how personal student information is used by companies and organizations, we believe that this bill would have inadvertently further eroded student privacy. Right now, both the Student Privacy Pledge and FERPA, as well as other federal laws, actually ban the use of student data for non-educational purposes including behavioral advertising, while this bill would seem to have allowed for that possibility. There is also much confusion and ambiguity in the bill’s language about how parents would be informed about how their children’s data was being used by companies, how to request its deletion, when this would occur, as well as what specific security protections would be required to protect against breaches.”